William Mann: Growing Up Gay In Connecticut
Best-selling author, professor, activist and chronicler of gay life, celebrity and history for more than 35 years, William J. Mann remembers an incident in 1991 when he was still in the closet to his family – even though he was co-editor of Metroline, Hartford’s periodical for the gay community.
At the time, he was covering the passage of a gay civil rights bill at the state Capitol for Metroline.
“The crowd was cheering, chanting, ‘We won! We won,’ and I’m there writing it all down,” says Mann from his office at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, where he teaches history. “A reporter from the Hartford Courant came up to a group of us and asked for our names and I thought, ‘Please don’t publish my name because I haven’t come out to my parents.’”
But hadn’t he had been writing for and editing Metroline at that point for several years?
“My parents never read Metroline,” he says, smiling, “but they did read the Courant, and not only was my name in the paper but also my photo. I called my parents and said, ‘Umm, yeah that’s me.’”
And the reaction?
“It didn’t go well at first. My father was city treasurer in Middletown and once ran for mayor. My mom worked at the Superior Court and my older brother worked for [former U.S. Senator] Chris Dodd. We were a very political-type family, and there was my face in the Courant as ‘the gay guy.’”
But family attitudes gradually improved so much “that within five or six years, my parents were basically PFLAG people. They both ended up loving my husband, coming to our wedding in P-town, and my husband and I were with my mother when she died. That’s how close we all became.”